The Coffeespy

IraqSlogger works some magic with its headline:

Well, that's interesting.  I suppose you could chalk it up to a bad source and pretend that fact checking is a mythical standard, but when you actually read the story at IraqSlogger you find no mention of failures on all benchmarks.  What you'll read is how they haven't been met, but as "Project Management for Dummies" will tell you, benchmarks are marks of progress, not pass/fail barriers.

I declare this a Joker level boner.  And the Jooker doesn't like it when others horn in on his boner territory…

I'm sure IraqSlogger is already looking into outdoing it's own boner.  I can't wait to see their "new adventure in crime!"

Update: LA Times calls measuring performance a "costly blunder."  The unspoken suggestion is to follow the Democratic congress' policy of not measuring anything and simply speaking out of one's ass on any given subject.  Don't worry, if we just leave Iraq and forget about this whole terrorism thing, it'll go away.  Lord knows we shouldn't be checking our work.

Stan "the Man" Lee responds to the LA Times:

Thank you, Stan, for that sparkling commentary.

Coffeespy's younger brother, Cappy Chino, has repaired the damage done by professional programmers.  Indeed.

In honor of this most historical event, here is a robot riding a gorilla wielding four, count them, four machine guns!  Even better, he brought extra ammo and uses a prime number as his battle cry!

If I may step out from behind the Coffeespy mask for a moment, I will try to explain the dearth of new material.

Several of the readers already know I’ve been working hard (harder than usual, at least) on a work of fiction. When this occurs, I stop reading the work of others for fear of subconsciously adopting their style and I also have to get in the proper mindset of living, eating, and breathing the characters’ lives. So from 5am to 10am or so, I have dominated a soft, cushiony seat at Starbucks and churned out around 10 manuscript pages per day.

After rocketing up to 95 pages, I realized I hadn’t outlined the middle very well. So I came home and wracked my brains trying to figure out how to get a political activist organization pitted against the forces of robotic talk show hosts to slowly escalate their battle (stop laughing, this is serious stuff). Unfortunately for you, this makes it very hard for me to connect the world of comic books to the world of comic politics.

I’ve had quite a bit to say about the comics I’ve been reading, but my fear is that too many comic book posts will lose some of the connections I’ve come to cherish on my blogroll (particularly Common Sense Political Thought and IT(L)TIE). I’m not sure if they could justify leaving a comic book pundit on their rolls. Others, like Skalduggery and Life on the Installment Plan, I believe would keep me on their rolls even if I started publishing recipes using Spam, the meat-like product, as long as I made it slightly witty.

Then, out of nowhere, WordPress pooped on all my articles. I have wonderful A^’s sprinkled throughout the entire thing and my old theme won’t work with the new version. Finally, it looks like I will be starting a low paying, thankless job where I’m told the real reward is the work itself. Always be suspicious when they tell you your compensation is, in part, the work you do…

So the challenge is trying to balance all these things without admitting the entire situation is probably entirely fueled by my neurosis. And that’s where the title for this entry came from.

So… in order to keep on top of things, I will put out a couple of posts tonight, one I’ve been holding for Friday Calf-Blogging tomorrow, and then pretty much be publishing random musings on anything that catches my eye for the foreseeable future. At some point, and even sporadically until that point, I will return to the comic-poli-blog niche because, really, no one else will.

Just so you know I haven’t lost it, here is a completely inappropriate, out-of-context interaction between Batman and Robin:

Well, I clicked on the automated “Upgrade WordPress” button and it has done something screwy with the formatting of EVERY ARTICLE and disintegrated my blogroll.

I’m not a tech guy of that level so…

…I dunno. We’ll see how I feel about this in the morning I guess.

How do I feel right now? If WordPress were Batman, I’d be the cat:

While Terri of IT(L)TIE was busy showing off Little Thorn, Coffeespy HQ had devised a fiendishly clever contest centered around calf blogging complete with a prize so awesome that to hear of it would blow off all your clothes!

However, due to technical difficulties (which amount to an in-law turning my computer off so they could log-in while I was driving the wife to work) you will have to wait until next week for it.

This week, however, I was still able to find something allowing me to participate in Friday Calf Blogging and maintain the superheroic integrity you’ve come to expect from the Coffeespy Command Center:

Of course, a blogosphere extravaganza is the Coffeespy way of saying: “I will disguise my dearth of original writing by linking shamelessly to more fertile grounds.”  But fear not, dear reader, for only the best (or worst) get linked by Coffeespy HQ and the mighty Internet BS Machine!

And without further ado, let the freaking-you-out marathon commence!  To get you into the right mood, here are some dinosaurs flying fighter jets:

If you haven’t already gone blind from the audaciousness (I’ll send Obama my nickel later) of the king of lizards in a fighter cockpit, try to hold on a bit longer as I reveal the Born Again Redneck Yogi’s post on what could be the equivalent of a campaign H-bomb — a Thompson/Giuliani ticket:

I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see a Fred/Rudy ticket. It’s a winning combo in this media-driven celebri-culture. I’m not an idealist and that would suit me fine. How about you?

Look, don’t be lazy.  Follow the link and read his post.  It’s a short and sweet on why this may come to pass.  Unfortunately, the Internet BS Machine has yet to match Rudy for his superhero sidekick, but Fred has the most ringing endorsement to date.  As Frank Miller might put it: He’s the goddamn Batman!

Honestly, if a Fred/Rudy (Frudy?) ticket comes to pass I think the announcement might go something like this:

That’s right, I dared.  I have invoked the jade giant’s visage.  How could I not when the dialogue was so utterly appropriate: “Puny humans.  I have come to smash.  And you should know who’s to blame.”  Oh, we know, Frudy, we know.

While we here at Coffeespy HQ are content to see the world in the four-color purity of denial, the Redneck of Supreme Serenity is hampered by things like integrity and realism.  He’s not about to say Fred is the equivalent of Reagan Reborn.  Back to the Dharma of BARY:

A word of caution to the romantics - Fred is not the Dalai Lama. He is a seasoned politician who has lived in the Virginia suburbs of DC for 30 years and has lobbied for some pretty iffy causes.

Are Fred’s supporters ready to handle reality? I am. Why? Because he’s electable and mostly sincere about his support for conservative clients.

Speaking of sincere support for conservative clients, that crazy Rick Moran brings us a sobering look at Giuliani distancing himself from, in the vernacular of the Nuthouse, “Typhoid Larry”:

The most marked retreat from support for the President among the frontrunners has been by Rudy Guiliani, who invoked the name of Reagan in an unflattering comparison to the current President:

Right Wing Nuthouse goes on to use tools like facts, figures, and even reason rendering it unusable by Coffeespy HQ, but good for you to go read nonetheless — unless your brain is already full.

Finally, we come to the last entry in our Tuesday Blogosphere Extravaganza!  If you are still able to cling to your keyboard by your fingernails after reading the face-pounding majesty of the wisdom above, then your efforts are not in vain.  I have discovered the finest guest blogger the internet has ever produced on a third monday in a month of June in which a Fantastic Four movie has been released.  I give you the Coastwatcher guest blogging at I Think ^(Link) Therefore I Err:

If there is another attack on this country, the Left will scream it was orchestrated by President Bush. The Right will call for a response, and the center will look to be kept safe. They won’t look left.

As with the Nuthouse post, there is reason, logic, and even a certain recognizable sanity — rendering it unusable by Coffeespy HQ personnel.  It also comes with the same warning: Go read it to get smarter, unless your brain is already full.

And there you have it.  A toe-curling whirlwind of political punditry encompassing the mightiest potential ticket since the Lincoln/Roosevelt run to the self-shriveling Democratic Party ploy.  But don’t you fret, we’ll reload the Coffeespy Cannons and be back soon to take more potshots at the feet of titans!

I have finally received a spam message so strange that I cannot help but reprint it here:

Free cartoon pokemon porn…

Oh, where to begin.

First, nice to know it’s free.  The idea that the author felt the need to let me know it’s cartoon pokemon porn, and not real pokemon being violated, leaves me wondering if it came from a crazy man or if there is something I need to know about the world — perhaps I’ve always known and constructed elaborate denial mechanisms to deal with it. 

Whether it’s real or cartoon, I do find myself wondering if they’re using male or female pokemon and if the performers filled out the age of consent forms.  Finally, instead of ending in an enthusiastic exclamation mark, we’re given the apathetic three periods.  While I’m sure this is an advertisment, I’m left with the image of an adult bookstore clerk who has realized his life has been spent as a functionary to society’s masturbatory pursuits and discovered the glamour to be gone.

Let us not forget about potential poke-puns for film titles:

• Bulba’s Sore - The tale of a grass pokemon and his demanding master.
• Squirtle’s Squirtle - I didn’t really have to work too hard for that one.
• Team Rocket in My Pocket - See what happens when Ash decides to be bad… really, really bad!

Now I’m off to take a shower.  Oh, welcome to Google’s “I’m Feeling Lucky” visitors.  Sorry to disappoint.

Terri from I Think ^(Link) Therefore I Err says it’s too nice to blog about bad stuff today and has, instead, turned her chance to opine into a chance to bovine.  All I can say is:

Calf blogging!  You can’t stop it, you can only hope to contain it!

Adapted to our own particular idiom, of course:

Coffeespy HQ wishes the Pondering Penguin a blogtacular birthday!  Double P is the kind of blog where punches are not pulled.

Yeah, the Pondering Penguin is roughly that awesome.

SiteMeter has informed Coffeespy HQ that our readership has leaped to a mighty average of 34 per day, atomizing our previous average of 24.  Since the only change in the site has been the addition of superhero commentary (and me being sick today), we’ve decided to simply put something absurd on display.  Our marketing department projects that readership will continue to improve with our level of absurdity.

And so, I give you bo staff-chainsaw-shark-fighting!  And believe it or not, the only one talking smack is the shark!